Author
Topic: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen? (Read 4738 times)

in our home we have central touchscreen located in kitchen and we control eveything through UI1.

But since a lot of usefull family stuff is also present on Web, I would like to enhance touchscreen experience when web browsing under on-screen Orbiter.

Are there any alternative browsers, Firefox add-ons, special web-page changing sites or tools for better touchscreen experience (I remember similar featurs on mobile browsers) or anything similar for doing convenient web browsing with touchscreen ?

The Firefox we are currently running, needs to be replaced with an xulrunner based app, that can respond to DCE commands.

At this point, we can make some needed changes:

(Make a better interface for pad orbiters to be able to:

* View pages on the pads themselves, or * bounce them to individual media directors OR to workstations (running an agent)* Be able to highlight links on TV better (this is the one thing I liked about WebTV)* Be able to scroll more effectively* Get rid of extraneous buttons and features.

etc.

Come on guys, please, am I the only one who is thinking out of the box, here? This is getting frustrating.

I think Bulek is just trying to address an immediate family need by upgrading his ff. And yes, Bulek you can do that from KDE, I did to mine. I think I ended up with 2 versions of ff installed and had to muck around to ensure that Computing was using the right one..

But yes, Thom, on the strategic vision for integrating browsing with the DCE environment... I remember you mentioning it previously, I think that is a great idea!! Do you think this should start out with a DCE wrapper around normal ff, or go straight to a native type device? I understand that ff 3.0 is already based on XUL?

It's simpler to make a new wrapper, either by directly instantiating XPCOM stuff in a two-tiered thread configuration, or by doing a quick implementation to run in XULRunner. The Point is:

* There is too much UI in Firefox for a TV based web browser, not that anyone notices...but...* There needs to be DCE communication with the rest of the system so that Orbiter can present buttons for UI, and present necessary feedback.

It's simpler to make a new wrapper, either by directly instantiating XPCOM stuff in a two-tiered thread configuration, or by doing a quick implementation to run in XULRunner. The Point is:

* There is too much UI in Firefox for a TV based web browser, not that anyone notices...but...* There needs to be DCE communication with the rest of the system so that Orbiter can present buttons for UI, and present necessary feedback.

-Thom

I agree Thom 100% and we're looking at adding web apps as a mediatype and using XULRunner as the engine. We need this because we want to add services like the BBC's iPlayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer as a mediatype in the Media menu.

However I agree with Collin - the LinuxMCE-0710 release shipped with Firefox 2.02 and Flash 9.0x and these increasingly will not support many Web sites and in the case of Firefox has significant security issues. So we took the view that updating to Firefox 3.03 and Flash 10 was the right intermediate step to take and therefore released an update to rectify this.

That sounds great Andrew! I too have problems with ABC's iview http://www.abc.net.au/iview/ (National broadcaster, equivalent to BBC) they have an extremely slick Flash interface but ff/flash9 doesn't like the video bit and crashes out... I know ABC have content restrictions for overseas IP addresses, so I'm not sure at what point that link will crap out on a UK IP address, be interesting to know how far it lets you get

That sounds great Andrew! I too have problems with ABC's iview http://www.abc.net.au/iview/ (National broadcaster, equivalent to BBC) they have an extremely slick Flash interface but ff/flash9 doesn't like the video bit and crashes out... I know ABC have content restrictions for overseas IP addresses, so I'm not sure at what point that link will crap out on a UK IP address, be interesting to know how far it lets you get

It will not let me in from the UK...as expected. But we have found that none of the heavily flashed sites that we previously tested fail now with Firefox 3.03 and Flash 10 so I would be pretty sure this would also be the case for the iView service too.

How much work is to run firefox 3.0 and upward versions on LinuxMCE 7.10 instead of alpha version ?

I'm also curious if one can widen slider on right side? Themes enlarge icons but no change on sliders...

Well its pretty easy to do... we just repackaged the 'stock' ubuntu package from the repository. But we did this mainly because we were changing some other Dianemo specific stuff...so i am not sure if on a standard LinuxMCE-0710 install you would need to repackage at all.

I cant say if changing the Windows controls in the way you describe would be possible - we have not tried it.